Ashley Lande

“But beneath it all loitered that gnawing doubt that Hitchens had inadvertently sewn within me: that tenacious desire for something beyond materialism, a desire that was sometimes nothing more than a whisper and sometimes a gripping, consuming in that had eclipsed all else and compelled one to seek all manner of earthly pleasures in futilely trying to satiate it. Could this be the last thing, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, as I'd later write? (p.52)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“I shut God Is Not Great halfway through and stared at the yellow cover, now garish and embarrassing in its boldness. I was - what was I? Disappointed. Bereft. Disgusted, even. I slid the book underneath my bed, where I wouldn't have to look at it and thus further consider my confusion. For perhaps the first time since I'd so confidently declared myself an atheist to my shocked parents, the hard dome of my determined irreligiosity suffered a fissure -- minute, barely perceptible, but relentlessly niggling, like the pea beneath a tottering stack of mattresses... I let Hitchens abide with the eddies of dog hair and dust under my bed, relegated to the dark margin where I never swept... (p.42,43)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ